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Power BI General Availability Coming July 24th

by Dann Anthony Maurno
Assistant Editor, MSDW

Power BI dashboard 

Microsoft on Friday announced that Power BI will be generally available July 24th.

This culminates fully seven months of user input and incremental improvements. Microsoft in December released a Power BI preview, and closed it down in mid June to put on the finishing touches. The preview version added new dashboards, visualizations, a native iPad app and live "hybrid" connectivity to on-premise SQL Server Analysis Services tabular models. It also added support for integration with popular third party solutions like Marketo, zendesk, Salesforce, and GitHub.

Well, here it is at last, and "I think this is huge," wrote Dallas Salazar in Seeking Alpha, who observed that Microsoft wants Power BI to be "the platform for business intelligence across both SMB and enterprise deployment." Enhanced ability to tailor reports in Power BI Desktop (which until now was called Power BI Designer) can only drive adoption and use cases. And, Microsoft's adoption of burst development versus version iterations has proved it is listening to its user base, which wants to put its ideas to work now.

As for pricing, Microsoft will be sticking to its "freemium" model, with Power BI being free and Power BI Pro costing $9.99/user/month. For that you get all the functionality of Power BI plus collaboration tools, plus 10 GB/user ...

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About Dann Anthony Maurno

Dann Anthony Maurno is a seasoned business journalist who began his career as International Marketing Manager with Lilly Software, then moved on as a freelancer to write for such prestigious clients as CFO Magazine; Compliance Week;Manufacturing Business Technology; Decision Resources, Inc.; The Economist Intelligence Unit; and corporate clients such as Iron Mountain, Microsoft and SAP. He is the co-author of Thin Air: How Wireless Technology Supports Lean Initiatives(CRC/Productivity Press, 2010).